“I am your father. I’ve been living under this roof for two years, paying my dues, putting up with your rules and your attitude. I have every right to make improvements that benefit the household. Or did you forget that you invited us to live here?”
That was the spin, wasn’t it? I had invited them.
The truth was messier, and it sat in my stomach like a stone. Two years ago, my parents had declared bankruptcy. Dad’s “investment opportunities,” which I had learned meant gambling on penny stocks and lending money to his equally broke friends, had finally caught up with them. They’d lost their house in the foreclosure.
Mom had called me crying, saying they were going to be homeless, that Dad’s knee was too bad for him to work anymore, that they just needed somewhere to stay for… maybe three months. Tops. While they “figured things out.”
And I, like an idiot, had said yes.
Aunt Alice had died eight months before that, leaving me her custom brick ranch house on three acres of Texas hill country. The property was worth over a million dollars, a ridiculous windfall for a twenty-eight-year-old UX designer who had been living in a cramped apartment in downtown Austin. The property taxes alone were $25,000 a year, but I had been managing. Remote work paid well, and I had been careful.
When my parents asked to stay temporarily, I convinced myself it was the right thing to do—filial duty, family obligation, all those things that had been drilled into me since childhood.
Three months became six. Six became a year. Now it was two years, and they had completely taken over.
They had moved into the master wing—the entire east side of the house, with its spa bathroom and private patio—claiming Dad’s bad knee meant he couldn’t handle stairs. Never mind that my home office was upstairs and I had to climb those stairs a dozen times a day. Never mind that I’d watched Dad take those same stairs just fine when he wanted to raid the storage closet for my aunt’s vintage bourbon.
They contributed exactly zero dollars to household expenses. No groceries, no utilities, no property tax. When I’d tried to bring it up delicately, Mom had cried and said I was punishing them for being poor, and Dad had gone silent and cold for three days until I apologized.
They treated the house like it was theirs. They threw parties. They rearranged furniture. They criticized my decorating choices, my cooking, the friends I invited over.
And I had let them. Because I was weak. Because I didn’t know how to say no. Because some broken part of me still believed that if I was just good enough, patient enough, generous enough, they might finally act like parents, instead of parasites.
But this—this was different.
The rose garden wasn’t just plants. It was Aunt Alice’s legacy. It was the place I had spent summers as a kid, helping her prune and mulch, listening to her stories about each variety: the Madame Hardy she’d gotten from a nursery in France, the Reine de Violette that had survived the freeze of ’89, the climbing Don Juan that covered the arbor where she’d scattered my uncle’s ashes.
It was the only place on the property that still felt like hers, like mine, and they had bulldozed it to install a freaking golf course.
“I want it put back,” I said, and my voice came out harder than I had ever heard it. “I want you to call these workers off, return the turf, and figure out how to restore what you destroyed.”
Dad actually laughed.
“Put it back? Skyler, those plants are in a dumpster halfway to the landfill by now. What’s done is done.”
“Then you can replace them. There are heritage rose nurseries. You can—”
“I am not spending a dime on those thorny death traps,” Dad said. He set his tea glass down on the patio table with a decisive thunk. “The putting green is happening. The turf is already paid for—your credit card, by the way, since you’re the one with the account access. You’re welcome.”
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